What Tongues are Wagging About

• The Apple iPad – never heard so many ‘feminine’ device jokes in such a short time!

o        THE GOOD:

• The starting price ($499)
• The reported life (10 hours of video playback, 1 month standby)
• The new iBook book store
• The potential for gaming, e-reading, and magazine content

o        THE BAD:

• The extra wide bezel
• No multitasking
• No Flash

o        THE UGLY:

• The NAME
• AT&T as a data partner

o        THE MAD FLURRY OF NEWS COVERAGE:
TWiT.tv was superb. Leo Laporte did a live shot outside the Yerba Buena Center an hour before the event. He delivered analysis via cell phone while in line to get inside. Using his cell phone, Laporte delivered live audio for the first half of Steve Jobs’s presentation. For the second half, Laporte (or someone with him) streamed live video (against Apple’s rules). Meanwhile, TWiT.tv personalities anchored the live broadcast in studio. More than 110,000 viewers watched the event on TWit.tv, Laporte said.

gdgt delivered the best live blog, photo-centric as usual. gdgt’s deep investments in its content management system paid off in fast, reliable performance. Gizmodo was photo-centric and stayed reliable. Engadget was photo-centric too, but we lost its feed three times.

Ars Technica and Technologizer suffered from technical difficulties; a third-party live-blogging application named CoverItLive failed halfway through the Apple presentation and remained offline for 20 minutes.

Computerworld blogger Seth Weintraub live-blogged only a few lines before technical difficulties scuttled him. He returned, but too late.

Wired News had a decent live-blog but Condé Nast’s content management system places the oldest posts on top of the page and the newest ones at the bottom. Fail.

CNET.com commentators Molly Wood, Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman offered live video commentary during Apple’s presentation. Strangely, CNET covered the presentation by kibitzing while showing gdgt’s live feed. We weren’t watching every minute, but SWMS saw no reference to News.com colleague Erica Ogg’s live blog. Just as strangely, CNET’s in-studio video was presented under the banner Live @ CES 2010.

The Wall Street Journal, leveraging video from Fox News, offered a live feed — but on a 15-minute delay. Rupert M. won’t be pleased with TWit.tv picking his pocket. The WSJ’s Geoffrey A. Fowler live-blogged, delivering 19 feeds during one 30-minute span. That may seem like a lot, but it’s an eternity when you have the alternative of live audio and video.

The New York Times’s live blog was 15 minutes late in launching. Its Twitter feed showcased NYT edit talent, and also included Om Malik and Forbes.com’s Brian Caulfield. That feed was fun to read. But in our view, both the WSJ and NYT offered too few pics for such a visual product as the iPad.

• Elevation Partners invests in Yelp: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10442753-36.html and AT&T to launch a Yelp competitor: http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/26/att-yelp-advertising-technology-business-intelligence-buzz.html

Event Recaps:

• AppBuzz - About 200 folks showed up for the Unofficial Pre-Apple AppBuzz event and party at 111 Minna. A half dozen apps including SoundHound gave demos, though the wireless wasn’t working well and we couldn’t really hear the presentations – very poor planning in terms of technical support. Overall though, it seemed as though a lot of entrepreneurs were starting new companies – we heard about new TMZ/gossip apps, more FourSquare type apps and health app companies that are in their more nascent, or pre-conception stages. A bunch of press came (eg ReadWriteWeb, a lot of the app bloggers). Overall it was good to mingle and good branding for Spark (we kicked down a couple hundred bucks to help them get it off the ground).

Awards:

• UK Award – “Fast Growth Business Awards” due 2/12/2010: www.fgba.co.uk

Upcoming events:

• #140Conf announces speaker lineup for NY: http://140conf.com/
• Twitter developer conference: http://chirp.twitter.com/